CHRISTINA TWOMEY Protecting Slaves and Aborigines The Legacies of European Colonialism in the British Empire ABSTRACT The historiography on protection in the nineteenth-century British Empire often assumes that British humanitarians were the progenitors of protection schemes. In contrast, this article argues that the position of Protector or Guardian for slaves and Indigenous peoples in the British Empire drew on Spanish, Dutch, and French legal precedents. The legal protections and slave codes operative in these European colonies are compared to British colonial territories, where there was no imperial slave code and no clear status of slaves at common law. Drawing on debates in the House of Commons, Parliamentary Commissions of Inquiry, and the published work of abolitionists and anti-slavery societies, the article examines how the pressure for amelioration in the British Empire coincided with the acquisition of new colonies that offered ready-made models for slave protection. British reformers combined their calls for greater protection for slaves with their extant knowledge of European protective regimes. KEYWORDS humanitarianism, protection, British colonialism, slaves, Code Noir, Co´digo Negro Over the course of the nineteenth century, in settings as diverse as Trinidad, the Cape Colony, Australia, New Zealand, India, and the Straits Settlements, British governments and their colonial representatives created the office of Protector. There were Protectorates and Protectors for slaves, Indigenous peoples, and Chinese and Indian immigrants. The objects of protection were considered vulnerable—to rapacious masters and employers, to vicious settlers, or in the case of Chinese, to the hostility of European miners or the power of Chinese secret societies. Protectors had a range of duties that changed according to context. At the most basic level, Protectors were supposed to safeguard the interests of vulnerable groups and shelter them from abuse. Thus, for example, they heard complaints against slave masters, mediated for their charges in legal systems where their evidence was inadmissible, encouraged sedentary communities among Indigenous people, oversaw contracts for inden- tured labourers, and encouraged Christianisation and civilisation. Yet Protec- tors’ effectiveness was almost always limited and frequently compromised, Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 87, Number 1, pps. 10–29. ISSN 0030-8684, electronic ISSN 1533-8584 © 2018 by the Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php? p¼reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2018.87.1.10. 10 because colonialism was premised on the dispossession or exploitation of the subjects of their responsibility. The office of Protector therefore stood at the crossroads between humanitarian sentiment, state power, and the colonial project. Protection awaits a comprehensive genealogy. The emergence of the con- cept of protection itself and the foundations of its essential offices are not well understood. There has very been little research into how the language of protection, Protectorates, and Protectors came to be applied to such a diverse range of subjects or the transnational influences on its evolution and appli- cation. One assumption governs much of the historiography on protection in the nineteenth-century British Empire: British humanitarians were the pro- genitors of protection schemes.1 In contrast, this article argues that the genealogy of protection was rather more global, and, to take one example, that historians have insufficiently explored its indebtedness to European colonial legal codes. The position of Protector or Guardian for slaves and Indigenous peoples in the British Empire drew on Spanish, Dutch, and French legal precedents. Those models included basic forms of protection for slaves and also protective practices for Indigenous people. Protection was therefore not a peculiarly British nor humanitarian innovation, even though it was championed by reformers from the late eighteenth century as a form of ame- lioration for slaves and as a safeguard for Indigenous people in settler colonies. The concept of protection, and the office of Protector, drew only sporadic attention from historians until the 1990s.2 As former colonies moved towards independence in the post–Second World War period, there were a small number of studies of older colonial government structures, including the office of Protector.3 An interest in the history of previous state policies 1. A. Lester and F. Dussart, ‘‘Masculinity, ‘Race’ and Family in the Colonies: Protecting Aborigines in the Early-Nineteenth Century,’’ Gender, Place & Culture 16, no. 1 (2009): 63–75; Ibid., ‘‘Trajectories of Protection: Protectorates of Aborigines in Early 19th Century Australia and New Zealand,’’ New Zealand Geographer 64 (2008): 205–20; James Heartfield, The Aborigines’ Protection Society: Humanitarian Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa and the Congo, 1836–1909 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Michael Christie, Abor- igines in Colonial Victoria (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1979); E. J. B. Foxcroft, Australian Native Policy: Its History Especially in Victoria, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1941). 2. For an early example see E. J. B. Foxcroft, ‘‘The New South Wales Aborigines Protectorate, Port Philip District, 1938–50’’ [Part One], Australian Historical Studies 1, no. 2 (1940): 76–84; and E. J. B. Foxcroft, ‘‘The New South Wales Aborigines Protectorate, Port Philip District, 1938–50’’ [Part Two], Australian Historical Studies 1, no. 3 (1941): 157–67. 3. S. Ng, ‘‘The Chinese Protectorate inSingapore,’’ JournalofSouth East AsianHistory2,no.1 (1961): 89–116; R. Jackson, Pickering: Protector of Chinese (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1965). Twomey | Protecting Slaves and Aborigines 11 towards Indigenous groups in the wake of civil and land rights campaigns from the 1960s drove some interest in protection regimes, particularly in the settler colonies.4 From the 1980s, the influence of postcolonialism and post- structuralism in the academy refreshed the field of imperial and colonial histories. Historians increasingly took account of gender, race, and ethnicity in the way that they accounted for the power dynamics of colonial societies. Protectors, white men whose very task was often to record and hear the complaints of subject peoples, left an archive rich in possibility for reading against, and along, the grain. Historians have used the archives of protection schemes as a way to reconstruct the experience of slavery, to document the impact of frontier violence and expansion on Indigenous peoples, and to investigate how the subjects of protection might deploy its rhetoric for their own ends. Indeed, this work has been among the most innovative scholarly uses of such records, and it points to the necessity of conceiving protection, like humanitarianism, as the site of multidirectional power relations.5 The reinvigorated role of the United Nations with the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, and an increasing willingness to conduct international humanitarian interventions—culminating in the doctrine of the Responsi- bility to Protect (2005)—prompted a wave of new historical scholarship about the origins and past practice of humanitarianism, including older protection regimes.6 Much of this work has been concerned with elucidating 4. See for example Michael Christie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria. 5. J. E. Mason, ‘‘Hendrik Albertus and His Ex-slave Mercy: A Drama in Three Acts,’’ Journal of African History 31 (1990): 423–45 and ‘‘The Slaves and their Protectors: Reforming Resistance in a Slave Society, the Cape Colony 1826–34,’’ Journal of Southern African Studies 17,no.1 (1991): 103–28;E.V.DaCosta,Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Pamela Scully, Liberating the Family? Gender and British Slave Emancipation in the Rural Western Cape, South Africa 1923–53 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1997); John Lean and Trevor Burnard, ‘‘Hearing Slave Voices: The Fiscal’s Reports of Berbice and Demerara-Essequebo,’’ Archives 27 (2002): 120–33. Apart from work already cited, see Amanda Nettelbeck, ‘‘‘We Are Sure of Your Sympathy:’ Indigenous Uses of the Politics of Protection in Nineteenth-Century Australia and Canada,’’ Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 17,no.1 (2016). 6. See for example Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Brendan Simms and D. J. Trim, eds., Humanitarian Intervention: AHistory(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard D. Brown, eds., Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2012); James Heartfield, The Aborigines’ Protection Society: Humanitarian Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa and the Congo; Rob Skinner and Alan Lester, ‘‘Humanitarianism and Empire: New Research Agendas,’’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40,no.5 (2012): 727–47; Zoe Laidlaw, ‘‘Justice to India—Prosperity to England—Freedom 12 PACIFIC HISTORICAL REVIEW WINTER 2018 the contemporary resonance